The restaurant reservation service OpenTable has produced a Mother's Day campaign that suggests, with considerable understatement, that you might owe your mother more than you can repay — though a dinner out would be a start.
The campaign, created by the Melbourne agency 2045, centers on what the company calls "The BillBoard," a giant receipt installation suspended inside Melbourne Central, the shopping center in Australia's second-largest city. The receipt is absurdly long, in the manner of those CVS printouts that have become a reliable subject of Internet complaint, and itemizes the unpaid labor that mothers provide over a lifetime.
The line items range from the physical ("carried you") to the vigilant ("checked under the bed") to the infinite ("loved you infinitely"). The tagline acknowledges that the debt cannot be discharged: "You'll never settle the bill, but you can pick up the next one this Mother's Day."
OpenTable, which is owned by Booking Holdings, the travel conglomerate that also owns Priceline and Kayak, has reason to encourage dining out on holidays that traditionally fill restaurant seats. Mother's Day is reliably one of the busiest days of the year for the restaurant industry, a fact that OpenTable, as a reservation platform, is positioned to know better than most.
The creative approach — treating the sentimental occasion through the cold visual language of a receipt — is the sort of formal inversion that advertising has learned to execute well. Receipts are transactional and forgettable; the spot makes one funny, disarming and, in the parlance of the industry, "quietly emotional."
(Whether your own mother would prefer a giant public receipt itemizing her sacrifices or simply a phone call is, of course, a matter only you can determine.)
The campaign ran in out-of-home and video formats in Australia, where Mother's Day was observed on Sunday.
Original story published in The Drum: "Ad of the Day: OpenTable’s Mother’s Day receipt tallies a priceless debt | The Drum"